[stunnel-users] New and Utterly Confused on Ubuntu Linux

Sun Feb 20 22:46:36 CET 2011

On 02/20/2011 10:26 AM, Traps wrote:
>
> I am totally new to stunnel and am quite confused. I use Ubuntu 10.04 and
> have installed the stunnel4 deb package. I need to do a couple of things. At
> boot up I need to accept ssl connections on an inbound port and forward it
> to a non-ssl compliant app listening on another port. The second thing I
> need to do is make an ssl required connection to a pop server on another
> host out of a non-ssl mail client on the local machine. I have no problem
> with the ports, port forwarding, etc. I just do not know how to set up
> stunnel to accomplish this.
>
> Let's just use this as an example:
>
> 1. I need to accept inbound ssl connections on 995 (port 995 is open) and
> send them to the local machine non-ssl client listening on 2995.
>
> 2. I need to ssl connect to pop.gmail.com:995 via a non-ssl mail client on
> the local machine and I want the mail client to connect to stunnel on port
> 3995.
>
> 3. I need both of these scenarios to start at boot up.
>
> I don't even know where to start with stunnel4 to do this. Actually I can
> set up stunnel.conf for either but one's a server operation and the other is
> a client operation and can't get them both to work simultaneously. To start
> stunnel at boot up I simply edited /etc/default/stunnel and
> /etc/init.d/stunnel4 and changed ENABLED=0  to  ENABLED=1 in both files.
> Something tells me this is entirely the wrong way to do what I want to do.
> It works for either the client task or the server task, depending on which
> one I have enabled in stunnel.conf but I just know this is not how I am
> suppose to be doing it.
>
> Will someone help?

Perhaps I've resolved my own problem. I created a .config for my server 
mode and another for my client mode in /etc/stunnel

I also changed /etc/init.d/stunnel4 back to ENABLED=0

I also note a typo error in my first post. The other file I edited was 
/etc/default/stunnel4 rather than /etc/default/stunnel I left ENABLED=1 
as is in that file. I don't know if what I have done is correct but my 
logs are showing successful connects to both my server configurations 
and my client configurations.

I am baffled with one thing though. I note that when running one config 
file I have 6 stunnel4 processes showing in my System Monitor and when I 
run both config files I have 12 processes. Is the normal for some reason???

Traps